The teams at Mojang and Redmond have been hard at work preparing 0.14. Added to the game are: Hoppers, Droppers, Dispensers, Item Frames, Maps, Witches, Slime blocks, Redstone Repeaters and Comparators, Dyeable Leather Armor, Cauldrons, and Wearable Mob Heads. The beta is currently on build 6. Hopefully 0.14 will fix the performance issues, affecting android and windows phone devices. Since playing MCPE for me via ARBTServer, has been like presenting a slideshow, I welcome these changes.

What will you ask me?

Since my cake day is coming up soon, I thought of celebrating with you all by hosting a AMA (Ask me Anything). Time is TBA, and will be announced on the subreddit and here on the blog also. Be sure to come up with some questions to ask me.

Been a little quiet on the website lately! For that I apologize – my non-Minecraft life has been eating me alive, and many of the ARBiTors are back in school, so really everyone’s been busy. But I wanted to delurk long enough to say HEY I HAVE SOME BIG NEWS OH WAIT THE FEATURED IMAGE FOR THIS POST AND THE SIDEBAR ALREADY SPOILED IT WELLP. To make a short story long, October 7th was my birthday, and I got myself and by extension the rest of the gang a little present: An Acer Iconia One 7, the sole planned use …continue

August is drawing to a close and comes with several new faces from WSE, a blip with the website domain, and many amazing builds being built or just getting started on. Today I would like to highlight, a cottage near spawn. The cottage was built by BatMan3054 and the farm was built by Swarmhut. I like the use of bricks as part of the path material, because it really pops against the green of the surrounding grass. I admire how the windows of the building are irregular and somewhat mismatch. The windows of the house make it feel quirky. Stepping …continue

So things have been a little slow around ARBTland, mostly because I haven’t been online much in the past few weeks. (Stupid real life.) That said, over the past couple of weeks there have been a few changes of note.

First of all we got another visitor from WSE – Rudie! Always glad for the cross pollination between the two servers.

In terms of build news, the monument behind spawn keeps on expanding as new people come in. Rate we’re going that things going to extend into the sea. In addition to adding Rudie, FatalDeath and Billybob decided to silly up their statues by giving them tongues.

FatalDeath has been working on a wizard tower, and Rudie has also been building a very fairy-appropriate home in a large artificially created stump.

I’ve been busy too. Started working on a new skyscraper not far from Wacker Tower, loosely based on a building from SimCity BuildIt, which I’ve been also playing some on the side.

Lastly 5 has been working on a secret project under the Rainbow Balloon. Did I post pictures of that since I refinished it?

One thing I’ve been irked by since a few game updates ago – when they changed all the lighting, the ocean lost its translucency. It’s now REALLY hard to see underwater, which is a pain if you’re building something really deep under, and impossible if you’re trying to take pictures of said something, so the best I can do is sorta present a vague blob under the water taken from the surface.

In server improvement news, I’ve been waffling on transferring the game to an external server for a bit, weighing pros and cons of each platform. I’ve all but decided that I want to move the game to Pocketmine, as I have some experience with running it and it offers the most flexibility and customizability right now. But on the downside, it’s lagtastic, and mobs don’t work yet, which is a bummer; I like having random creatures roaming the world. It gives what can often be a lonely game a little bit of life. I supppose I could treat the missing mobs as a temporary problem, as the goal of PM will be to eventually replicate the full experience of the game, and its main programmer now works for Minecraft proper. The other major problem is that transferring/ MCPE worlds to PM is still an ordeal thanks to the leveldb storage format being a pain in the butt to work with/translate. I and others have put so much time and love and work into this world, so its pretty important that we continue to be able to play with it.